Amazon wishlist

Integrity squad now active: Applebaum

Mayor Applebaum says his new integrity squad is up and running at city hall – 20 people, all presumably making a nice fonctionnaire’s salary. Sorry, sounding like the Journal here all of a sudden, but I’m losing count of the special anti-corruption entities being created.

This is increasingly looking like yet another boondoggle. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Why not just give the existing police force the mandate to actually enforce the law here. Heck of a lot cheaper and I’d rather see cops doing it than bureaucrats.

I wish they would stop putting money in bureaucrats pocket and start putting in in real project or at least infrasctucture. We have enough pens and papers out there, enough now, we need action on the ground for all montrealers. Hopefully Mayor Applebaum wont spend his entire year on that single issue of corruption.

@Lutz – “je ne connais pas la culture policière, mais lorsqu’on veut les punir, on les retire de la circulation et on les met au ‘paper work’: je doute que l’aspiration des jeunes (et moins jeunes) policiers soit de combattre le crime ‘de cols blancs’…” Seriously? You think that because enforcing the law is too boring for the cops even though that is actually their job to do so, instead of making them actually oh, I don’t know – do their job, you think we need to hire a whole stack of bureaucrats. If your attitude is symptomatic it’s no wonder so many people perceive city bureaucracy as wasteful.

We should know more about the squad. I should think you’d want some forensic accountants, a couple of lawyers, and some cops, to bridge the knowledge spectrum.

A major problem at city hall (as in the provincial highway department) has been that the theories of neoliberalism put all the expertise in private hands, leaving the government – supposedly there to protect the citizen – powerless to counter the invoices and claims made by private industry. It may be painful and expensive to hire back some of the knowledge onto the public side.

On a smaller scale, yes. But I’m afraid we’ve got a bunch of squads now that will later be discovered to be ill equipped for the task, unable to cooperate with each other, and will eventually be shown to allow corrupt deals to be made anyway.